When the United States opened Operation Epic Fury against Iran, one of the weapons making its combat debut was the Army’s Precision Strike Missile—a ballistic round that is rocket-boosted off the launcher, climbs high, then comes back to earth at extreme speed.

It is the total opposite of a feather: up fast, and down fast. The inflation that war set off has managed only half of that trick.

Prices rose like the missile; they are coming down like a feather.

Economists have a name for the asymmetry. In 1991, the Oxford economist Robert Bacon described how retail gasoline prices “rise like rockets” when crude costs climb and “fall like feathers” when they drop.

President Donald Trump is about to test that pattern at the worst possible moment, heading into a midterm election shaping up to have a heavy focus on the cost of living.

Trump's Faulty Inflation Narration

The Iran shock reached consumers long before any peace deal could.

The Consumer Price Index rose 0.5 percent in May and 4.2 percent over the year—the first time inflation topped 4 percent since 2023—with energy responsible for more than 60 percent of the monthly increase.

It was the third straight monthly rise, after 0.9 percent in March and 0.6 percent in April.

At the pump, the national average climbed from about $2.98 the week the war began to a peak above $4.50 in May.

Trump has turned that economic problem into a political one.

Asked about the May report, he told reporters in the Oval Office, “No, I love it. The numbers were great,” before adding, “I love the inflation.”

Weeks earlier, he had dismissed soaring gas prices as “peanuts,” telling Americans he appreciated them “putting up with it for a little while” and adding, “I don’t even think about that. What I think about is you can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Early in the war, he had called the spike “a little glitch” and written that short-term oil prices were “a very small price to pay” for safety and peace.

Asked whether household finances weighed on his push for a deal, he said, “Not even a little bit.”

Every one of those remarks assumes a clean, fast recovery; that the moment the war ends, prices snap back.

But that is precisely the assumption the economics does not support.

Relief Has a Speed Limit

Two distinct forces will slow the cooling, and they happen to push the same way.

The first is the asymmetry Bacon named. Retailers and middlemen raise prices fast when input costs jump, but cut them slowly when costs fall.

It’s a pattern economists pin on menu costs, consumer search frictions and market power, and one documented repeatedly in U.S. gasoline markets since Borenstein, Cameron and Gilbert’s landmark 1997 study.

Gasoline, where prices reset daily, tends to lead the retreat; the national average has already eased to about $4.04.

But freight contracts, airline fuel surcharges, food distribution, insurance and grocery shelf prices travel through longer chains and stickier contracts.

The second force is physical. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas moves, was effectively closed for more than three months. Reopening it is not a switch.

Even after signing a deal, it will likely take months for the energy crisis its closure caused to ease; industry analysts say Gulf flows may also take months to recover even with a finalized deal.

The economist Justin Wolfers put it plainly: Oil would drift back toward prewar levels, but it would “take a while for prices at the pump to fall.”

Markets, by contrast, move in hours. Crude fell about 5 percent to a three-month low on Monday after Trump said a deal was done, with Brent near $83 and U.S. crude near $80; the S&P 500 rose roughly 1.7 percent.

A futures contract can reprice before lunch, but a supermarket’s pricing manager has to work through inventory, suppliers and margins.

The Midterms Will See the Feather

The political math is unforgiving. Trump owns the war, and Republicans own the calendar.

The president's approval rating has fallen to 37 percent in the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, with roughly two-thirds of voters disapproving of his handling of the economy and only about a quarter saying he is managing inflation effectively.

A Reuters/Ipsos survey found nearly two-thirds of Americans said higher gas prices had hit their household finances.

The cost of living is on track to be the defining issue of November.

That is especially dangerous because of how Trump won. He campaigned in 2024 as the antidote to “Bidenflation,” promising to lower costs on day one and to drive gas below $2 a gallon.

A president hired to cut prices has less room to blame inherited conditions for high ones.

He asked voters to make him the price-cutting president. Now he has to prove peace can beat the feather—on a deadline.

The Best Case for Trump Is Real

The White House's strongest argument uses the same evidence.

The war premium is already unwinding. Crude has fallen more than 20 percent in a month and now sits only modestly above where it was a year ago.

Gasoline is sliding first, exactly as the pattern predicts. Markets are betting on resolution.

If the Strait reopens after Friday’s planned signing in Geneva and shipping normalizes over the following weeks—Vice President JD Vance says the administration expects a “toll-free” reopening “for the long term”—relief could reach households before they vote.

A president who gets oil down fast can argue the spike was temporary, the mission necessary, and the recovery already underway.

There is even a clean political logic to it. Trump can say he ended the war and, depending on the details of the deal, that the short-term pain was both transient and worth it.

Voters may or may not buy that argument. But they are more likely to if the elevated costs have passed.

Floating Down to Earth

It could work, but the risk is twofold.

Voters grade presidents on felt prices, not futures charts, and Trump has promised this relief before.

In April, he announced a two-week ceasefire and a reopened Strait, crediting Pakistani mediation; the truce frayed, the Strait stayed obstructed, and the war ground on.

Promising tomorrow reassures voters only until tomorrow keeps arriving late.

The deal is slated to be signed on Friday in Geneva, and the Strait opening is supposed to follow. But the first real verdict comes from data, not diplomacy: the next inflation report, and the pump prices Americans see every day between now and November.

If the timelines hold, gasoline eases first, then groceries, freight and insurance—slowly.

Trump’s missiles reached Iran at tremendous speed and were back to earth in minutes.

His inflation problem falls at the speed of rent, groceries, insurance, freight, and memory.

In pricing, as in politics, the feather lands late.